Stories to tell, not stuff to show

Thinking about travel on this cold spring day and what it's meant for our family.

Whale’s Tail in Uvita, Costa Rica, 2019

On this frigid late-March afternoon, as the snow piles up on our sidewalk and the county plow rumbles by, I'm thinking of swaying palm trees and a bright sky. Moments ago, Andrew sent over his current view—a Miami boulevard, the heat practically emanating from the texted photo—in response to our family group-chat image of Alex using a wide broom to clean off his blanketed car before leaving for his evening restaurant shift. We must have at least six or seven inches at this point and it’s still coming down.

“I don’t miss that,” Andrew replied, adding a wide-eyed emoji, to our wintry scene. Then, below his postcard-perfect image: “The weather today is 84 and sunny.”

He arrived in Miami last night and I’m relieved he’s safely there after a long day of travel, and happy he is able to spend the next week, his college spring break, with his girlfriend, who is in grad school there. 

This is the first spring break in a long while that we’re not all together, not all going away to a warm place. The kids being older, doing their own thing, is part of it, but other factors came into play as we thought about whether a spring break trip was in the cards. Not this time around.

I haven’t ever taken for granted the bigger trips we have been able to go on, mostly because such vacations were never part of my own childhood and in fact weren’t part of our own family’s traditions until years after we became parents. As our kids reached school age, I got interested in planning getaways, spring break and otherwise. I discovered I enjoyed doing the research, getting into the plotting, mapping, and organizing. I liked the satisfaction of finding a decent deal or trying a new spot recommended to me by a well-traveled friend, of figuring out after trial and error what worked and didn’t work for our family, realizing the kind of travelers we are all together.